Sunday, December 4, 2016

The Silver Lining

Even before Donald Trump won the
presidential election last month, he had already made America a much worse
place.Trump’s emergence over the past
18th months have made our political discourse much more hostile and
much less coherent.Presidential
campaigns have always suffered from lack of substance, but Trump’s mere
existence as a topic stripped the entire 2016 season of whatever ideological clash
it might have otherwise offered.His
racism, misogyny, and lack of filter for either goaded our sensationalist media
into handing him much more free airtime than he deserved, creating a constant
and insufferable distraction from anything important or newsworthy in American
politics over the past year. He incited
violence by both his supporters and his opposition. He stoked racial tensions
and polarized our country like never before in my memory.And beyond our nation’s borders, he has already
done incalculable damage to America’s image and reputation as a leader worth
turning to for guidance and example.

Now that he’s won, the next four years
will surely bring much worse. With
Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress, Trump may attempt to deport
millions of illegal immigrants, ripping mostly innocent parents from their wholly
innocent children as punishment for victimless crimes. He will likely attempt to make most Muslim
immigrants register on a database, even those who have lived here peacefully
for years, and deport any who do not comply. He has appointed a cabinet full of
war hawks, drug hawks, authoritarians, labor protectionists, climate change
deniers and racists, plus an
Attorney General who’s all of the above. He may be able to impose abortion
restrictions, and perhaps even appoint judges willing to overturn Roe v. Wade. His foreign policy remains unclear, but
vaguely ominous, having floated support for multiple war crimes during the
campaign. He will almost certainly expand domestic surveillance, expand
detentions at Guantanamo, and expand a unilateral drone program that already
had far too few limitations or checks. He has threatened to censor media
outlets which criticized him. Although the Supreme Court will almost certainly
disallow some of this, the disastrous spectacle of the President openly defying
their rulings has never seemed so plausible.

With such frightening possibilities on
the immediate horizon, I am reluctant to write this entry at all. Optimism
seems irresponsible at the present moment.
It is not the time for libertarians to shrug, laugh it off and hope for
the best. This is a time for
libertarians to re-forge their Bush-era allegiance with the left, and to focus
our combined energies on four years’ worth of resistance and disruption strategies. Make no mistake: the glass is more than
half-empty.

Nevertheless, I see reason for hope over
the long-term, and for the next few years to be bearable libertarians will need
to cling to it. The silver lining is this: Trump’s rise to power will cause millions of
people to drastically reconsider their views on democracy, the state, and its
proper role in our lives, in ways which stand to benefit libertarian efforts to
constrain those institutions. For
all the damage Trump has done and will continue to do to both our discourse and
our policy, his presidency may have a sobering effect on political insiders from
both the right and the left that makes it easier to improve those institutions
after he’s gone.
On the right, Trump has done the political dialogue a tremendous service by teasing
out what’s rotten from what’s worth keeping. Specifically, he has teased out the racism
from the libertarianism, such that libertarians have an opportunity to shed the
oft-hurled accusation of racism so long as we consistently and passionately
oppose Trump.

The libertarian label has long been an appealing hiding spot for racists in disguise. From Goldwater’s segregationists to Ron
Paul’s newsletters, the Alex-Jones crowd has polluted our tolerant
individualist ideology with a hateful collectivist strain. But Trump’s
emergence has temporarily solved this problem by forcing self-labeled
libertarians to choose between ideologically consistent small-government
conservatism on one hand, or white-resentment and animosity towards racial
minorities on the other. Which
side you picked determines where your allegiances truly lie.

Consequently, the so-called “alt-right” has emerged as its own ideological
affiliation, recognizably distinct from libertarianism, whereas its members
would formerly get lumped together and give libertarians a bad name. As I
wrote months ago, “In destroying the
Republican Party, [Trump] has demolished the dual hiding place of nativists
pretending to be intellectuals, and intellectuals pretending half the country
agreed with them.” As it turned out, the Republican Party may not be dead
quite yet, but even so my point stands. Conservative
intellectuals appalled by racism, who had formerly supported the Republican
Party without qualm, must now take a hard look in the mirror as they reexamine
their political bedfellows. Meanwhile, those
libertarians who remain unbranded by the scarlet letter of Trump support will
have an easier time convincing audiences of their intentions and credibility
moving forward – especially now that
Trump’s victory prevents conservatives from abandoning him and pretending he
never existed.

Perhaps more importantly, though,
Trump’s presidency stands to deal a devastating and long-overdue blow to
left-wing people’s faith in government at large. That faith has always been misplaced, and we’re
about to witness why. The 2016 election
has already rattled people’s faith in democracy, including
even that puny smidge of it my cynical heart had left. With any luck, his administration it produces
will only continue to weaken people’s confidence in the state as the proper
mechanism for achieving social change. If
that lesson sticks, it will be very good for liberty in the long-run.

All through primary school, Americans are
taught a series of comforting myths about our political system. In fact, instilling
these myths was one of the primary
purposes for which public
schooling was originally created. There is no grand conspiracy behind it, but
that purpose remains alive and well today, at least subliminally. Nation-centric history books teach us one-sided
fables about how the government was founded, how it has governed since then, and
how it works today. We are taught nursery rhymes about our founding story and
the legislative process. We’re taught
that democratic
government is “all of us,” and can therefore be trusted; that “We the
People” call the shots. We’re even made
to stand in unison and recite a creepy pledge to a piece of fabric each morning
in which we remind ourselves that OUR government offers “liberty and justice to all.”
We play the national anthem before every sports game from middle-school
up, and expect everyone to stand silently for its duration: motionless and hat-less,
heads bowed as if in prayer to some revered entity. Politicians of all parties reinforce these
themes every chance they get.

All of this is intended to make you
believe that our government is three things: legitimate, morally authoritative,
and a noble instrument for social change.
Decades of subliminal indoctrination aim to convince you that the state
operates “with the consent of the
governed” – that you and your neighbors have a meaningful say in shaping
the law, which you should be both proud of and contented with. From there, the argument is made that the law
is a moral authority: because the law arises from the bottom up, from the
people, it allegedly follows that the law is righteous, the law is just, and we
have a sacred obligation to obey the law.
And finally, the leap of logic is made in our imaginations that because
the law is the arbiter of right and wrong, whenever we detect something wrong
in the world, we should turn to the state to make it right. We fantasize that this government of ours,
which we’ve been taught is so unique and so virtuous and such a courageous experiment
in “self-rule,” is THE essential tool for solving our society’s problems –
perhaps even the world’s problems.

All politicians want you to buy-in to
these three beliefs, because these three beliefs have implications on which
their power depends. The implication of
legitimacy is that you should vote, encourage others to vote, shame those who
don’t vote, and then accept whatever governing decisions your voting produces
as a rough approximation of what most people want. The implication of moral authority is that after
you’ve voted, you have an obligation to obey even those laws which you
personally opposed. And the implication
of government being an instrument for social change is that the whole endeavor
of governance is transformed from the relatively simple one of protecting our
most basic rights, and creating the conditions necessary for human progress to
emerge through peaceful means, into one in which the state itself must hire men
with guns to spearhead our personal moral crusades if any progress is to be
made at all.

The beauty of Donald Trump’s victory
this November is that the most educated among us can no longer square these
myths with the reality before them. It
is very difficult to claim President Trump’s every opinion represents the
legitimate will of the American people when his favorability ratings hover at
37%; or when only 55% of Americans voted, and only 46% of those who voted
picked him; or when he lost the popular vote to one of the least popular candidates
in US history. It is very difficult for
thinking people to believe that majority rule is morally authoritative when
anything close to a majority has supported someone as plainly
immoral as Donald J. Trump. And it
is darn-near impossible to view the American as a harbinger for social progress
when that system stands to undo so many decades of progress in a single
election.

The truth is that our government – and all governments – are nothing close to
the patriotic pornography that the West Wing opening
credits would have you believe. Government
is ugly. It is clumsy, it is heated, it
is inherently violent, it is lethal, it is unconvincing, and 99 times out of
100 it is ill-suited to making the world a better place. There’s nothing poetic about it. Donald Trump’s opinions do not represent the “will
of the people,” and neither did Obama’s nor any president before him. On the contrary, his opinions render obvious,
to any progressive for which it wasn’t obvious already, that democracy it isn’t
all of us deciding things together, nor even most of us. It is only some of us, appointed by others of
us, and no matter how many elections they win they shouldn’t get to tell the
rest of us how to live.

Just
as Trumps candidacy forced conservatives to choose between racial resentment and
small-government idealism, Trump’s presidency will force progressives to choose
between advancing progress and statism. I hope the choice is apparent. Democracy
is not sacred, and neither are its verdicts. That’s not a comforting realization for the
millions of Americans which have come to fetishize it, but it is an overdue
one.

The next four years will cause more and
more Americans to dispel,
one and for all, with these fictions [sic]. As more and more become disillusioned
with the state, libertarians need to have answers ready for the questions they
will start to ask: what caused this? How
did things get so fucked up? What
lessons can we learn from it? How can we
make the best of it while it lasts, and how can we prevent it from happening
again? If we can publicize compelling
answers to those questions, we will be in line to snatch up millions of new
votes by the time we do another one of these damn elections.

But more importantly, we’ll have finally
gotten through to people about the absurdity of it all. When people come to see
the state for what it is – not a battleground for the fate of humanity, but a
necessary evil for a narrow function – they’ll stop letting political affairs have
such power over their very self-identity.
They won’t be sucked in so gullibly to these 18-month media melodramas
over which inflated personality caricature will “rule the free world!” next, but
will instead seek to reduce the role this outsized and outdated institution plays
in their lives so they can get on with living them.

The law is an opinion with a gun; resist
it when you can, ignore it when you can’t.
The next four years will be embarrassing and will hurt lots of people,
but they won’t be Armageddon. Life will
move on. The greatest joys in life have
nothing to do with the state, and nor do the most exciting ways in which the
world is getting better. We don’t need government to improve the world, so let’s
not wait until 2020 to start trying.